Ripple Releases Two New Whitepapers With a Focus on Decentralization and Security

The San Francisco-based startup Ripple, had recently announced the release of two new white papers for peer review.

In brief:

Ripple, the third largest cryptocurrency is going to upgrade the underlying technology on which it operates.

Ripple, the third largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin and Ethereum, is moving to upgrade the underlying technology on which it operates. The startup that oversees development of the XRP is looking to increase security along with decentralization and has put out new whitepapers for peer review.

The San Francisco-based startup Ripple, had recently announced the release of two new white papers for peer review. The new whitepapers primarily aim at providing security and decentralization for XRP. XRP’s consensus algorithm is explained in a more formal way in one paper while the other paper describes a way to enhance the diversity of connections of each node, the software users run to verify transactions on the network.

The step taken by Ripple, which at present secures more than $40 billion in value, indicates that it is looking to invest in the core infrastructure supporting its cryptocurrency. XRP, whose investors include banks like Santander and SBI has become one of the most popular crypto assets. However, as compared to bitcoin and ether, the development of ripple has lagged behind.

The papers are possibly the first attempt since 2014 to detail the XRP Ledger. Moreover, the papers are also a statement on the enduring evolution of Ripple. The papers by Ripple clearly intend to develop a better relationship between the company’s research arm and academia, so that it becomes simpler for researchers to pursue Ripple’s technology.

CTO Stefan Thomas in an interview, told CoinDesk,

“This is the first time we’re releasing peer-reviewed academic papers. Obviously, it opens the door for future research. After this, I expect you’ll hear much more about us interacting with academia.”

Both the papers have one central theme, that is, security, according to Thomas. He added,

“What we’re trying to do here is add some defenses against some unlikely attack scenarios. Basically, it says you can’t completely manipulate the entire network. We’re extremely cautious. We want the best security.”

The first paper entitled, “Analysis of the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol” builds on the company’s 2014 paper when Ripple was first launched. It seeks to formally explain how the network runs and keeps transactions safe. The paper presents a formal, mathematical proof of what is supposed to happen on the network and focuses on two things, that is, “safety,” and “liveness,” which means that network will keep processing transactions.

“Cobalt: BFT Governance in Open Networks,” the second paper, addresses to the need of developing earlier XRP plans and aims to enhance the decentralized nature of the XRP token. This paper explains algorithm which aims to support a wider variety of nodes that are responsible for validating transactions on the network.

Lack of decentralization has been a serious concern of Ripple critics. Each node in Ripple holds a Unique Node List (UNL) and the nodes will soon connect to various nodes in order to effectively make the network decentralized.

Thomas avers, “It’s not going to affect how users use XRP right now. They won’t experience any downtime or anything.”According to him, both the papers are expected to have a long-term impact as they are more theoretical and are based on distributed systems, a body of computer science research explaining how large connected networks function.

There are people who have remained skeptical of ripple’s technology from the very beginning and now it is to be seen if these developments, including papers, are going to reduce criticisms that Ripple faces.

Critics of ripple are even those who applaud other blockchains, like bitcoin or ethereum, as they seek to use decentralization in a different way. Thomas, however, states that Ripple is responding to market needs. He declares that reducing centralization of validation is their next step and he asserted that in future Ripple will be “far more decentralized” than bitcoin.

He says, “Critics are always one step behind. When I started at Ripple, all sorts of things didn’t happen. It wasn’t open-source, we didn’t have validators, but over time it’s grown and we’ve been able to accomplish all of these things,” reported CoinDesk.

Disclaimer: This is not an investment advice. It is of paramount importance that everyone should do his or her own due diligence before investing in any product, platform, tokens etc. Cryptocentral.io does not endorse any content or product published on this page. Our aim is to simply provide all the readers with the latest information in the field of cryptocurrency / blockchain industry that might be of interest to our readers.